Red Bank Green

Serving Red Bank and Greater Red Bank, NJ

A Manhattan-based clothing store catering to women aged 16 to 36 has signed a lease in downtown Red Bank, redbankgreen has learned.

Dor L’Dor, a financial-district casualwear shop that also has stores in Brooklyn and Hoboken, will take over the space last occupied by Chelsea Home furnishings at the corner of Broad and Mechanic streets, real estate agent Karen Gagliano confirms.

A person affiliated with the store  whose name means “from generation to generation” in Hebrew  said the family-owned business expects to fit in well with fashion-oriented emporiums downtown, including its largest new magnet retailer, Urban Outfitters, which opened less than a block away in November.

From the Today Show to her appearance tomorrow night in Red Bank, THE HAPPINESS PROJECT author Gretchen Rubin has followed her bliss right to the Number One spot on the NY Times bestseller list.

The pursuit of happiness can take you to some pretty unexpected places  just ask Gretchen Rubin, whose own chronicle of the year she spent “test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier” has taken the former US Supreme Court clerk straight to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list.

Tuesday night, April 13, the author of The Happiness Project follows her bliss to Red Bank, where she’ll visit NovelTeas Authors Aromas & Gifts for a sold-out reading and signing appearance that was originally scheduled for what turned out to be a decidedly snowy evening back in February.

It’s got a leading man who keeps his Redford-esque looks even when marinated in blood, dust and grime. A chorus of maidens whose siren songs are worth the price of admission in themselves. A couple of drag parts, a bonus comic book  and a surprise cameo from a member of show business royalty.

In today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, we review and report on the opening of Orestes, A Tragic Romp, the new version of the 2,400 year old Euripides drama (adapted by Anne Washburn) now on stage at Two River Theater Company. We’ll tell you that it boasts a sharp cast (toplined by Jay Sullivan, above) plus a savvy satirical edge  and it’s a romp made all the more tragic in that it represents the final show that departing TRTC artistic director Aaron Posner developed for the Red Bank stage.

While we’re on the aisle, we’ll bring you an update on the Performance with Passion Players, the local community troupe (headed by Debby and Mike Schwartz) who recently lost their longtime home at the Eatontown Playhouse on Route 35. We’ll tell you about the company’s spacious new digs  and we’ll let you know where you’ll now be able to find fellow E’town exiles Improv Jam  right here in Red Bank oRBit!

You might know Chris Mumford as the sure-shot chef behind Mumfords Culinary Center in Tinton Falls (as well as his fondly recalled restaurant in Long Branch). But just as every successful dining room has an unseen kitchen behind the scenes, today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit takes a look at Mumford’s not-so-pretty struggles and strifes along the road to success as a family man and business owner.

Directed by son Kyle Mumford (left), the documentary Mumford’s Law is both a tribute to a father and a candid crack in the wall surrounding “a family that had to be torn to pieces before it could truly come together.” We’ll report from the film’s first public showing in Eatontown  and we’ll tell you where and when you can look in on this family gathering yourself.

While we’re in a moviegoing mood, we’ll also run down this weekend’s 8th annual Garden State Film Festival in Asbury Park; a townwide celluloid-abration with lots to offer for film buffs in general, and Monmouth County movie-mads in particular. These coming attractions are approved for all audiences, and they’re right here in Red Bank oRBit!

Dad was the famous novelist who wrote From Here to Eternity; Mom was a glamorous being who was friends with people like Jackie O  and home was Paris in the 1960s, where some of the world’s most renowned writers, artists and actors regularly came to visit, and the drinks flowed, and flowed and flowed.

Novelist and educator Kaylie Jones (right) would seem to have had a storybook upbringing but as we observe in today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, it was an environment where “keeping up with the Joneses meant going drink-for-drink against people who could be as competitive about their consumption of cordials as they were in their passionate professional pursuits.” With the publication of her memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me, Jones details the devastation that alcoholism wrought upon a family in which literature and liquor were given equal heft.

For most of us who had to make his acquaintance in school, Euripides is a stonefaced statue, and his 2,400 year old playOrestes a dusty and decaying scroll of papyrus. But to Aaron Posner, the classical Greek dramatist is “a rebel…anything but old fashioned”  and his work a theatrical experience that’s “modern, surprising, complex.”

In fact, when Orestes begins its run at Two River Theater Company this week, it’ll be subtitledA Tragic Romp  with Posner and playwright Anne Washburn blowing the dust off this landmark work in a way that’s sure to recall the director’s energized editions of Shakespeare, Shaw and other stage titans. We’ve got an interview with Posner  on the eve of what unfortunately looks to be the last Red Bank show personally helmed by the departing TRTC artistic director  today, in Red Bank oRBit!

Today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit has the details on the first-ever Axelrod Classical Music Festival, a “celebration of spring” (and ’bout time, too) that’s going on this weekend on the AxPAC stage of the JCC of Monmouth. It’s a collection of regional talent heretofore unseen on a single platform, complete with a recession-busting ticket and an atmosphere about which it’s been said “there is nothing even remotely stuffy.”

While you’re out taking that fresh spring air, you might want to take a walk by the GARDENhead; the innovative, cerebral Red Bank area band for whom projected images and Macbook post-prod are as essential as the skronk of a guitar or scrape of a violin. Dustin Racioppi introduces us to this anything-but-garden-variety duo  and tells us where we can root for them  ONLY in Red Bank oRBit!

Cigarettes and neon nightclub signs illuminating rain-slicked city streets. Desperate characters in suits, ties and fedoras; fatal femmes and alleycat shadows, phone booths and gunshots in the night. We know them as the calling cards of Film Noir, but over at Red Bank oRBit we’ve found out that Noir happens in the most unexpected places  even in the broad daylight of a Sunday afternoon.

Today’s edition of our satellite site has an interview with award winning mystery novelist, recovering newspaperman and RBC grad Wallace Stroby, on films noir, novels and the no-man’s-land between. The author of such Shore-based suspensers as Heartbreak Lounge and The Barbed Wire Kiss visits Asbury Park’s Showroom this Sunday, to present a screening of Stanley Kubrick‘s classic caper The Killing and to talk Noir with oRBit editor Tom Chesek.

We’ve got the lowdown on this hardboiled entry in the BookFLX series, along with a pre-screening conversation with Stroby, ONLY in Red Bank oRBit!

Although their entire store isn’t much bigger than the amount of space allotted to fancy chocolates at the supersize Barnes & Noble, the quartet of owners at River Road Books have regularly bested the big boys at their own author-appearance game  offering up a mix of national figures and intriguing local authors, many of whom we’ve profiled in the pixelated pages of Red Bank oRBit.

It’s a policy that’s helped the intimately-scaled indie store strengthen its brand in a world of steamrolling stripmall superstores and virtual-volume vultures. And it’s back in full force this Thursday, as POZ Magazine editor-in-chief Regan Hofmann (above) visits Fair Haven for a signing and discussion of her memoir I Have Something to Tell You  a chronicle of how a young woman who “had it all” concealed from the world the fact that she also had HIV.

The author action continues on Saturday with Little Silver’s own picture-book creator and self-styled “phoDOGrapher” Kim Levin stopping in to promote her new book DogPlay. After that, the River Road crew presents a pleasantly surprising, long-awaited homecoming by someone who’s been out of the public eye for far too long  but rather than spoil the surprise, why not just take it over to Red Bank oRBit, where this late-winter’s week continues to come on like a literary lion!

He was called a lot of things in his day, many of them unprintable in your virtual family newspaper  but in today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, you’ll hearNorman Mailer referred to as a great and good friend.

In his memoir Mornings with Mailer, author Dwayne Raymond (right, with Mailer) conjures his years as editorial assistant, cook, confidant and yes, friend to the late great novelist, essayist, poet, moviemaker and alpha-dog celeb of American letters. Raymond comes to Red Bank for a reading and signing appearance at Kim Widener‘s new NovelTeas Authors Aromas & Gifts on Bridge Avenue tomorrow evening, and we’ve got an exclusive interview with him right here, right now.

Also today, a look at two Holocaust themed events that compel the attention  a single-performance stand for the one-woman play Etty at Brookdale Community College (directed by the familiar stage/ screen/ TV actor Austin Pendleton), and a serious cinema event at the JCC of Monmouth in which acclaimed filmmaker Anne Aghion will join two generations of genocide survivors for a live discussion. It’s all happening in the early days of the week, and it’s all here inRed Bank oRBit.

In yesterday’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, we talked to stage illusionist Kevin Spencer about the vanishing of the fabled “fourth wall” between audience and performer. Today we’ll introduce you to some folks working the frontiers of that colorful “gray area” where the show leaves off and the audience takes over.

The oRBit desk talked to producer-director Nick Montesano of NENAproductions Theater Project about his new production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the school-set Tony winner going up this weekend at the old-school Jersey Shore Arts Center in Ocean Grove. Nick and his NENA crew were the first troupe in the area to present the musical phenom Rent last year, and they’re first out of the box again with Spelling Bee, a show that delightfully blurs the line between cast and crowd.

This weekend also sees the first-ever local screening of REPO! The Genetic Opera, the cult sci-fi musical (with a cast that includes Paris Hilton, pictured above) that’s been pitched as Blade Runner meets Rocky Horror. Like that fan-driven midnight favorite, REPO is often accompanied by live-actor “shadowcast” performers  and we talked to the head of the Shore-based “Traitors to GeneCo” as to what to expect at TheShowroom on Saturday.

It’s all here, with lots more picks to come  Oscarized and otherwise  ONLY in Red Bank oRBit!

Magician’s wives have never had it easy  they’ve been sliced, diced, shot at, twisted, turned into zoo animals, or simply disappeared  and one top trickster allegedly made the fact that he was a married man into his most closely guarded secret. In today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, however, we reveal the identity of magic’s longest-running couple  and explain how this 25-years-plus union has also become a full partnership in prestidigitation.

Married since 1983, Kevin and Cindy Spencer (above) have made their home on the road for a good part of each year  and when they return to the Count Basie Theatre this Friday, the Spencers will transform the Count’s crib into a Theatre of Illusion, with a road-tested roster of grand gags (many of them unique to their act) that includes an awesome Walk Through a Brick Wall, a Mind-Read with the entire audience, and the ever-popular Spikes of Doom.

We’ve got an exclusive interview with Kevin Spencer, one half of one of the most award winning acts in hocus-pocus history  materializing ONLY in Red Bank oRBit!

We don’t know about you, but here at Red Bank oRBit we are unequivocally “finished with the Feb” and ready to put that shortest (and, as it turned out, cruelest) of months behind us, as we fix our Ides on March and its promises of attitude adjustment  from the lion’s mouth, right on through the lamb’s tail.

Today’s edition of redbankgreen‘s satellite site has the goods on Dine Downtown, the returning promotion by which the folks at RiverCenter and much of the Red Bank restaurant community bands together to offer a set of discounted Prix Fixe dinner options, every Tuesday and Wednesday evening throughout the month of March. We’ve got the delectable details, some suggested shows to chase that dinner with, and a handy-dandy guide to all the participating bistros, boites, banquet rooms and beaneries.

Also today, a reminder of another March comeback  this one the return of the Nelson Riddle Orchestra to Asbury Park. The late great Oscar-Emmy-Grammy winning composer, arranger and bandleader (above) helped forge the sounds of some of the biggest names in the music biz  AND he was in the first graduating class of Rumson High School. The family-led project presents a pair of dinner/show concerts this weekend at Tim McLoones Supper Club, along with a rehearsal reception on Thursday and a Riddle-related Saturday matinee screening at theShowroom. We’ve got the details on this swingin’ session PLUS an archived look back at our interview with Riddle’s daughter Rosemary, only in Red Bank oRBit!

We deal with a lot of hyphens in this business, and in today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, we’ll introduce you to an actor-playwright-director-impresario who’s made it a mission to “navigate the hyphen” in ‘African-American’  as in, how much of me is African, and how much American?

In his play The Fula from America  a one-man show that will be making a one-weekend stand in Red Bank  Carlyle Brown addresses that question, as he portrays the real-life characters that he encountered on a soul-searching trip through western Africa. As the founder of Minneapolis-based Carlyle Brown & Company suggests, it was a trek in which many of the most surprising discoveries were about himself.

The Fula from America comes to the Marion Huber performance space at Two River Theater for four performances beginning Friday  and we’ve got an interview with this dynamic stage talent, right here in Red Bank oRBit!

To two or even three generations of bands and their fans in and around the Jersey Shore, the partystarting sonic bounce of reggae’s hypercaffeinated little cousin SKA continues to score new fans each year. But ask the ska-punk band next door and you might hear how they were inspired to step up the beat by a wave of 1970s-80s British bands that included The Specials, Madness, and, maybe especially, The English Beat.

Today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit has an exclusive interview with Dave Wakeling (right), co-founder and longtime frontman of the band that gave us such alternative radio and club classics as Mirror in the Bathroom, Save It For Later and some tantalizing takes on Smokey Robinson and even Andy Williams. The California transplant  whose resume also includes serious stints as a kids’ soccer coach and a Greenpeace advocate  now fronts a US-based Beat lineup that’s complemented by a UK version, led by former bandmate Ranking Roger (with whom Wakeling also tried a little “Tenderness” in General Public).

It’s that American edition of The English Beat that returns to the Stone Pony on Thursday night, topping a Spring Skaward Tour that also includes the great 80s band Fishbone. We’ve got Wakeling, full stop, here today in Red Bank oRBit!

We here at Red Bank oRBit do what we can to create a trustworthy source for timely tips on how and where to spend your discretionary dollars and idle-hour attentions  but who do we turn to for recommendations? People like Lorraine Stone and Rock Wilk  each of them profiled previously in our pixelated pages, and both of them champions of a young poet and spoken word artist named Tylik TIGGA Railey.

Born in bred in Asbury Park (and heard in venues ranging from The Inkwell to Brookdale Community College to Nuyorican Poets Cafe to national poetry-slam competitions), Tigga (left) has a lot to say about life in the city where his family has made its home for generations  and this Thursday, he’ll be saying it atThe Showroom in an autobiographical multimedia performance piece entitled Photographic Memory.

Equipped with live musical accompaniment by a talented student of Asbury Park High School  and preceded by a special free “warm-up” show  the presentation (sponsored by ArtsCAP and rescheduled from this past December) represents the most ambitious move yet for the self-described starving artist of another stripe  and we’ve got the “sabertooth trooth” in an exclusive interview with Tigga, ONLY in Red Bank oRBit!

The pursuit of happiness can be a pretty serious undertaking for anyone to whom it was ever promised in writing  and, as you’ll learn in today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, one seriously happy writer has managed to cut through the static of the self-helpers and the life-coachers with a book that’s making a lot of people rethink some of the most cherished myths regarding that smiley state of being. For example, money can buy happiness. And not only can you not “have it all,” you never really wanted it in the first place.

The Happiness Project is an account by Gretchen Rubin (left) of “the year she spent test-driving studies and theories about how to be happier.” It’s a popular book (with accompanying blog) that’s taken the former US Supreme Court clerk to some interesting places  like the Today show and the top of the NY Times bestseller list. On Thursday, the author comes to Red Bank for a reading and signing appearance at Kim Widener‘s new NovelTeas Authors Aromas & Gifts on Bridge Avenue.

Unfortunately for happy-come-latelys, that event is now sold out, but we’ve got an exclusive interview (well, we’re sharing her with Ann Curry) with the woman who’s brought a whole new “app” to “happy,” and there’s a lot to learn  including the meaning of the mystery word “shticklet”  right here inRed Bank oRBit!

You’ve seen his somber, silent, life-size figures in places like the Port Authority and the National Mall  and now George Segal is coming to the outskirts of town. Not the veteran comic actor (although that would be cool too) but the famed artist who became the most noted American sculptor of his time by championing the “everyman” over the “great man.” Today’s edition ofRed Bank oRBit has the details on a major installation of those distinctive sculptures, paintings and drawings by the Jersey-based Segal (who passed away in 2000)  joined with a retrospective of images by his friend, assistant and photographic chronicler Donald Lokuta (pictured at right with Segal on the Asbury boardwalk).

It’s all going on at the Monmouth Museum in Lincroft, with a menu of extras including catered receptions, special guest speakers, and an unprecedented field trip to the artist’s (heretofore off-limits) home studio.

Its never been an uncommon thing for writers to prostitute themselves. Its just that, in the strange case of David Henry Sterry, the latter activity served as springboard to the former.

Today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit has an exclusive interview with Sterry (right)  an actor, professor, children’s book collaborator, HuffPost blogger and sports authority who made his first big splash with Chicken, his memoir of a year spent putting himself through college as a 17 year old LA male hooker. The author and editor has also garnered acclaim for the anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys and the how-to guide Putting Your Passion into Print, both of which will be the focus as Sterry visits Asbury Park’s Showroom this Sunday.

For this entry in the BookFLX series, Sterry and a guest panel of “sexperts” will discuss Hos and screen a collection of clips on Hollywood and the Sexworker  after which the publishing-biz specialist will hear book-pitch ideas from the audience in a feature that could only be called Pitchapalooza. We’ve got what you need, right here and all week along, in Red Bank oRBit!

He claims to have sworn off doing interviews forever and a day; he’s never had a hit record, and the guys from TMZ likely ignore him when he goes traipsing through airport terminals. But when John Prine takes the stage of the Count Basie Theatre this Saturday, he’ll be squinting down a full house of fanatical followers for whom the 63 year old Grammy winner (left) is a writer and performer of rare and sublime talent.

In todays edition of Red Bank oRBit, we call upon Tim Cronin  the man at the front of the Ribeye Brothers and the back ofJacks Music  for an appreciation of the singer-songwriter who’s proven his bonafides among discerning music fans coast to coast. All this plus the latest mystical gleanings from The Orb listings database, ONLY from the paperless offices of that office-less paper,Red Bank oRBit!

With the entire area one big shovel-ready project this morning, today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit takes one look out the door, crawls back beneath the covers and begins dreaming of what promises to be a big three-day V-Day weekend blizzard of sweetheart deals (with plenty of diversion for the detached).

On Thursday, we report on the 13th annual edition of the Brookdale Guitar Show, hosted by Brookdale Public Radio and happening at the Warner Student Life Center on BCC’s Lincroft campus. Dustin Racioppi has the details on this ever-popular event, with guest stars this year including acoustic songstress Allie Moss (above), electric jazzguy B.D. Lenz and alt-Americana specialist Joe Whyte.

Then tune in Friday as we line up a slew of St. Valentine’s weekend wonderments against the wall, picking them off one by one  everything from lingerie shows and theatrical loveletters to big-name concerts and bowling with burlesque. It’s a non-meterorological blizzard of multimedia merriment, ad it’s ONLY in Red Bank oRBit!

It’s “two on the aisle” over at Red Bank oRBit, where yesterday we gave you the backstory on a new production of Barefoot in the Park, going into previews tonight at Two River Theater. In today’s edition we take it down to New Jersey Repertory Company in Long Branch, where the professional playhouse prepares to premiere a new drama by the name of Exposure Time.

Based on events in the life of Alice in Wonderland author (and pioneer photographer) Lewis Carroll  his competition with a famed female portrait artist of the Victorian era, and his controversial relationship with the real-life version of Alice  the play by Kim Merrill promises to surf a wave of renewed interest in various denizens of the Wonderland underground, courtesy of Disney’s forthcoming 3-D thrillride Alice.

We’ve got a conversation with the playwright and a first look at how this Exposure‘s developed, right here inRed Bank oRBit!

One’s the most successful writer of comedies in Broadway history. The other’s a serious scholar of classic literature, a retired college professor and founding father of Two River Theater Company. Together they’re teaming up for laughs this Valentine’s season, as Robert M. Rechnitz prepares to open a new production of Neil Simon‘s Barefoot in the Park at the Red Bank performing arts auditorium named for Dr. Rechnitz and his wife Joan.

Today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit the details how the professor  a man more likely to be found staging the works of Chekhov, Ibsen and Moliere  came to be “Simonized,” as he tells it, and fall in love with the 1964 comedy by the creator of The Sunshine Boysand The Odd Couple; “a delightful, compelling play that moves like lightning.”

On the eve of the first previews for the production that stars Meg Chambers Steedle and John Wernke (above), director Rechnitz talks about his personal history with this show, about Simon’s lasting legacy, and about how a good romantic comedy brings out the youthful blush in all concerned. Read all about it, right here inRed Bank oRBit!

Now that the agita-inducing quasi-holiday known as Valentine’s Day is bearing down upon us, it’s only fitting that we seek relationship advice from those rare couples who’ve lived and loved and worked together since long before that first mile of internet wiring was strung. In today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, we take our questions directly to one of the longest-running couples of show business.

Having been introduced by their agent and married on Merv Griffin‘s old TV show, Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna have certainly gone the distance with each other, both personally and professionally. Married over 44 years, the playwrights/directors/actors (you know her as Fran’s mom on The Nanny; him from My Favorite Year and other major movie roles) are coming to the Count Basie Theatre for a touring performance of their autobiographical comedy show known as If You Ever Leave Me…I’m Going With You!

We’ll talk to this classic team about how their own marriage has resulted in such collaborations as Lovers and Other Strangers; about those transitions from acting to writing and vice versa  and, rest assured, about their own prescription for a healthy married life and working partnership. The secret is just a click away, inRed Bank oRBit!

We media types can never resist the opportunity to hitch our wagons to a rising star  the better to say “we made ’em what they are today.” In Tuesday’s edition of Red Bank oRBit, we’ve got exclusive profiles on a couple of dynamic artists; one of them a young guy making a career move that could only be described as Ugly  and the other a driven performer whose latest all-consuming project has left him Broke Wide Open.

We’ll introduce you to Everett Brothers, the Middletown native (and professional hip-hop dance instructor) who’s poised to take the next step in a burgeoning career  and who can be glimpsed on Wednesday’s episode of the ABC TV series Ugly Betty  a show that, while it’s not long for this earth, also served to give a boost to the career of local singer-songwriter Val Emmich last year.

We’ll also bring you an updated interview with a guy who you’ve met previously in our pixelated pages  Rock Wilk (above), the seriously skilled singer and spoken word artist whose autobiographical powerhouse performance piece Broke Wide Open has evolved into a full-fledged stage play. A frequent visitor to our Shore, the Brooklyn-based Rock will be commandeering The Showroom in Asbury Park this Friday for what’s said to be the final solo performance of the piece, before moving on to the next, ambitiously enervating phase of a project that took shape in and around the bookstores, coffeehouses and guerrilla art spaces of Monmouth County.

You met ’em here first  and you’ll read all about ’em, ONLY in Red Bank oRBit!